Archive for April, 2025
No One Is Safe As Trump Gleefully Deports Migrants to El Salvador’s Mega-Guantánamo Without Evidence, Or Even Via An “Administrative Error”
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In the sordid, chaotic, belligerent and openly racist “war on migrants” that Donald Trump declared when he took office on January 20, two particular truths about the administration’s intentions have become increasingly evident, and both of them are profoundly disturbing.
The first is that no immigrant to the US from anywhere in the world — but mostly, to date, from countries in Central or South America — is safe from arbitrary detention and deportation, and, in particular, the threat of being deported, not to their home countries, but to a notorious prison in El Salvador, where prisoners are held indefinitely without charge or trial, dehumanized, half-starved and subjected to relentless violence. The CECOT prison, established under El Salvador’s dictatorial president, Nayib Bukele, is nothing less than a futuristic, turbo-charged version of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.
The second cause for deep alarm is the Trump administration’s absolute contempt for any legal challenges to what it aggressively claims is its right to detain and deport anyone it feels like detaining and deporting. Primarily, to date, Venezuelans, these men are routinely described as dangerous “high-threat aliens”, gang members and terrorists at war with the US, although the administration has failed to back up its hysterical claims with anything resembling evidence.
Disturbingly, the administration insists that all of its claimed deliberations about who to detain and deport are shielded from any kind of scrutiny or review because of national security concerns, claims that are nothing less than the thinnest of covers for what is actually the the unacceptable and unconstitutional exercise of unfettered executive power.
The Case of Mahmoud Khalil: Trump Aims to Destroy the First Amendment and Deport Legal Residents to Defend a Genocide
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Over the last 18 months, the veneer of civilization has worn so thin that the darkness is pouring in, threatening to engulf us all.
It all began, of course, on October 7, 2023 — not with the attacks by Hamas and other militants in southern Israel, but with Israel’s response, which, almost immediately, very evidently involved implementing the “Final Solution”, with the full support of the US and most other western countries, to what was perceived as the long-standing “problem” of the Palestinians refusing to patiently and non-violently submit to a grotesque system of apartheid, to being expelled from their land, or imprisoned within it, or to being murdered indiscriminately, or imprisoned arbitrarily in brutal and fundamentally lawless prisons at the hands of their aggressors — monstrous injustices played out incessantly over the previous 75 years.
In all of the violence between Israel and the Palestinians in the long decades since the brutal, blood-soaked founding of the State of Israel in 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and 750,000 exiled, nothing — not even the 1,139 deaths on October 7 (even discounting the as yet untold number of those who were killed by the Israelis themselves under the Hannibal Doctrine), or the more than 2,300 Palestinians killed in the longest of Israel’s previous military assaults on Gaza, for seven weeks in 2014 — can compare with the almost entirely relentless slaughter and destruction of the last 554 days, in which almost the entirety of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed, and, at the barest minimum, over 50,000 people have been killed, most of whom were civilians.
Not content with engaging in the industrial-scale slaughter of civilians on an unprecedented scale, gleefully advocating genocide while pretending it is the world’s only perpetual victim, and has an infinite right to “defend itself” without any constraints whatsoever on its actions, Israel has also worked assiduously to promote its narrative in the west, having spent decades embedding itself in the corridors of power, and in newsrooms, and also, in recent years, aggressively promoting a legally-implemented definition of antisemitism that involves not, as it should, targeting the sweeping and indiscriminate hatred of an entire people that typifies all forms of racism, but by pretending that antisemitism actually means opposing the actions of the Israeli government, even when, as has been the case for the last 18 months, that government is manifestly engaging in a genocide.
Photos and Report: The Monthly Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure – and No More Migrant Prisoners – on April 2, 2025
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On Wednesday April 2, campaigners across the US and around the world — in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, London, Brussels, Detroit and Phoenix, AZ — held the latest coordinated monthly vigils (the “First Wednesday” vigils) calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and for Donald Trump to stop using the prison — and the wider naval base on which it is located — to hold migrants facing deportation from the US. Organizations involved include various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo, the UK Guantánamo Network, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait, with support from numerous other organizations.
Through illness or other commitments, three other vigils — in Mexico City, Portland, OR and Los Angeles — didn’t take place, while the vigil in Cobleskill, NY was moved to Saturday April 5, to coincide with the “Hands Off” rallies against Trump and Elon Musk taking place at over 1,400 locations across the US, attended by an estimated three million people.
Photos from the vigils are posted below, and please read on for some context about the vigils, their history, and their relevance.
Israel’s Sickening and Depraved Options for Gaza: Extermination, Concentration Camps or the Illusion of “Voluntary Migration”
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I remember when I last had hope.
I last had hope for six weeks — from January 19 this year, until March 1 — when the relentless genocide in Gaza, the most soul-stripping depravity any of us have ever witnessed, seemed to have come to an end. Before that, I hadn’t had any hope for 15 and a half months — including the whole of 2024; every damned second of it.
Millions of us have felt the same; as though a noose was permanently around our necks, strangling all joy, the colour drained out of existence like a corpse, but we have been powerless to prevent Israel’s leaders, and our own complicit leaders, from doing anything to stop it, as though it was some sort of natural disaster.
Those six weeks of hope were the first phase of a ceasefire agreement, when Israel’s incessant bombing stopped, when humanitarian aid supplies resumed, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returned from the south to the north in a defiant show of strength and solidarity, and when 33 Israeli hostages were freed in exchange for nearly 1,800 Palestinian prisoners and hostages.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
